Trees

Walking down Jhushan, we took the road that begins next to the railroad station and follows the railroad track, where it is easy to climb down if you want to. It wasn't 6am yet, but it seemed to me that it was much later —I was confused most of the day with the time of the day&mdash, and everything was wrapped in the serenity and coolness of a sunny morning. At some point, we took a shortcut and walked straight through the forest, following a stone path.

Japanese used these forests to obtain a lot of wood. That's why they cut down century-old trees, very thick, the remains of which, roots and lower parts of the trunks, we could see while we were walking down, still there after 60 or 70 years. The size of some was really impressive. It seems that japanese planted three trees for each one they cut down. That maintained the forest, at the cost of losing the ancient trees, which seem to be venerated by taiwanese.



The descent went on and we could see all kinds of impossible shapes

or piling-ups of trees that grew on top of trees that grew on top of ancient trees. It's what they call three generation trees.

Everything is very clean and organized, even if I could find some trash in hidden places. We finally reached an esplanade at the end, where there were a primary school and a buddhist temple


We kept on walking downhill, following a stream, crossing a hanging bridge, now finding more three-generation trees,

until we arrived a side of the mountain full of giant red cedar trees. The tallest, and oldest maybe, is called the sacred tree. It is this one

with a calculated age of about 2300 years, 45 meters high and a circumference of about 12m (I think). Close to it, there is another one, 1000 years old, and then twenty or thirty more, all more than 600 years old. It was like being inside a fairy tale or in one of Tolkien's stories.

From here, after seeing the remains of the previous sacred tree, which had to be cut down after dying, we went back to Alishan and then to Fenchihu. It was a morning of beautiful forests and nature. What a diference with the cities!.